Why I was proud of our 2012 handover

Financial Mail talks to the former banker who made £110m when he left Goldman Sachs, but who faces his biggest challenge in running the 2012 Olympics...

Up against the wall: Paul
Deighton will be relying on the organisational skills he gained at Goldman Sachs

Faking the fireworks and using photogenic tots to mime songs may have worked for Beijing, but it is not an option for Paul Deighton, the former investment banker who is in charge of London's 2012 Olympics and Paralympics.

The 52-year-old all-round sports nut and, more helpfully, ex-chief operating officer for investment bank Goldman Sachs is the chief executive of the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, a private company chaired by double Olympic gold medallist Lord Coe (see below), which will stage the event.

Deighton and his organisation are about to come under the kind of criticism that would make his Chinese counterparts start looking up re-education camps.

It is, to an extent, a labour of love for Deighton and perhaps it has to be because otherwise even the hefty £536,000 a year salary might not compensate for the scrutiny he will come under for the next four years.

Deighton most definitely does not need the money from the Olympics job. He was a partner at Goldman Sachs before it floated on the New York Stock Exchange in 1999, when he made about £110m.

His brief is to organise and run the Games and to raise £2bn from sponsors, broadcast rights and ticket sales. The Olympic Delivery Authority is there to build the infrastructure, for which it receives £9.3bn in public funds.

Deighton's last role at Goldman Sachs was to ensure that all the systems-were in place to get the bank's huge deals done.

He took the Olympic post three years ago after spotting an advertisement in The Economist for the job, which his wife said was 'made for him'. The family shares his love of sport, with the couple's two sons, aged 20 and 18, particularly interested in rugby and tennis.

Unusually for an investment banker, Deighton is self-deprecating and unpretentious enough to note that few wives are starry-eyed about their husbands so, taking his wife at her word, he applied for the job and was accepted.

'I left a wonderful machine full of brilliant people where you were always changing things at the margins to make a difference,' he says.

'Here, you build from a zero base to employ 3,000 staff with 70,000 volunteers and 100,000 contractors. You have to get the right people as you do it all just once and then it dissolves. It's unique.'

The Cambridge economics graduate joined Bank of America before spending the next 22 years with Goldman Sachs.

Deighton has just returned from Beijing, where he watched his first summer Olympics, along with a team of 100 colleagues who shadowed their opposite numbers, learning what worked and what did not. 'They now know what 11,000 athletes coming down to breakfast at the same time is like,' he says. 'We looked at the end-to-end experience.

'You might have watched Rebecca Adlington win two golds on TV, but if it had taken you ages to get into the venue because of security checks that would have diminished the experience.'

However, as a taster for what is to come, Deighton experienced the reaction to the eight-minute handover ceremony in the Bird's Nest stadium when London got to show the rest of the world what it could do.

There was a double-decker bus breaking apart to reveal Leona Lewis singing Whole Lotta Love accompanied by Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page on guitar, all topped off by David Beckham kicking a football into the crowd. A barrage of criticism followed with many people describing it as 'tacky' and 'embarrassing'. But he says it provoked 'oohs' and 'aahs' of appreciation in the stadium when the bus unfolded.

Deighton says: 'It was about getting people in the UK ready and excited about becoming host city and we combined it with celebrations all around the country, which had not been done before.

'The handover show at closing ceremonies in the past has always been a travelogue for the next host city and is usually described as ''best forgotten'' - it's always panned. My own experience was really positive, I'm very proud of it.

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'The Chinese took the combination of technology and artistry inside the stadium to a point where we would not want to go any further.

'We won't confine participating in our opening ceremony to the stadium and we'll set the tone for a warm, inclusive games.'

His office reception area on the 23rd floor of a Canary Wharf skyscraper in London's Docklands affords a commanding view of the building site that will be the Olympic main stadium.

Deighton, who lives in central London, aims to raise £700m from sponsorship and London has signed seven main backers - BP, British Airways, BT, EDF Energy, Lloyds TSB, Nortel and Deloitte.

He and Coe have already raised more than £400m so Deighton does not fear the effects of the credit crunch, saying he can afford to wait until conditions improve if necessary.

'We started looking for sponsors when the economy was in the best possible shape and we needed to demonstrate quickly that we had financial momentum,' he says.

'It was not a coincidence that we chose the banks first - it was a good time for them. We went into competitive sectors where Olympic sponsorship could provide a significant edge - look what a boost it's already been for British Airways flying the team back.'

Team GB's terribly un-British ' winning matters' mentality clearly appeals to Deighton. 'Everyone in the UK seems to think the Brits are going to cock it up, but we're not,' he says.

'We know what we're doing. It's working. And the games are going to be wonderful.'

If he is wrong, all the money in the world is not going to help him.

Coe a winner despite big losses

Lord Coe, chairman of the organising committee for the 2012 London Olympics, is a winner in the wage stakes, though his company continues to lose money.

The twice-winner of the Olympic 1,500m race enjoyed a 50% pay rise, to £334,000, for the year ended December 2007 from his management company, Complete Leisure Group. CLG lost £750,000 last year following on from losses of £832,000 the year before.

The firm was established by Coe two weeks after he spearheaded London's successful Olympic bid in July 2005. It has interests in health clubs, event management and the free newspaper, Sport. The company also owns Coe's image rights and invests money raised from his after-dinner speeches into start-up sports firms.

Chairman Harold Tillman, owner of fashion brand Jaeger, replaced CLG's chief executive Tim Howland in July last year to assume day-to-day running of the group.

Another of Coe's interests, Premier Sports Holdings, which has more than 100 franchises providing sports training to primary school pupils, recorded a loss of £70,000 in the year to August 2007.